Sommer Browning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Great Things from the Department of Transportation

 

My mother desires to track my location on her phone.

My mother announces that she’s “latex intolerant.”

My mother is horrified that the children’s cartoon character Caillou is bald.

My mother to the server at a terrible restaurant: I don’t want a box—I want a flamethrower.

One’s mother might be the most famous person one knows.

My mother says, There is no Denny’s, only Zuul.

My mother on penises and traffic cones: On occasion they’re both orange, aren’t they?

The young lungs of my mother fill with fine particulate matter on the streets of Clairton, PA.

My mother on the X-rated hypnotist: He was only concerned with having the hypnotized persons act sexually stupid.

One night in the 1970s, in the Mojave Desert, my mother ceases to feel apart from the world.

My mother pays my sister and me $40 each to not have birthday parties.

My mother’s soulmate is not my father but her dog, Six.

The only thing I don’t like about John Wick is that he never washes his hair.

My mother’s father, a bipolar beer distributor, laughs at least once that I know of because it echoes through me for 40 years.

On the whole my mother likes Miranda July’s novel, The First Bad Man, but could have done without the sex parts.

I listen to my mother tell my child a story as if I were my own daughter.

My mother tells me there were some skanks on America’s Next Top Model.

My mother asks, Didn’t someone famous say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

My mother prays for her children every night.

My mother prays for children every night.

I bet you never thought you’d marry, have a baby, and get divorced before you’re 40, she tells me.

My mother expects great things from the Department of Transportation.

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Sommer Browning is a poet, writer, curator, and artist. Her latest book is Good Actors (Birds, LLC; 2022). She's the author of two other collections of poetry, Backup Singers and Either Way I'm Celebrating, as well as the artist book, The Circle Book (Cuneiform Press), the joke book, You're On My Period (Counterpath), and others. In 2017, she founded GEORGIA, an art space in her garage in Denver. Her poetry, art writing, and visual art have appeared in Lit Hub, Bomb, jubilat, Chicago Review, Entropy, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a Librarian. ["Great Things from the Department of Transportation" first appeared in the American Poetry Review.]  _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                      René Magritte. The Double Secret, 1927. Oil on canvas. 114 x 162 cm (44.8 x 63.7 in). 

Comments

[Indran Amirthanayagam]

Brilliant, saucy, sweet and funny. Thank you for exposing the mother's fears and desires, which we can all recognize. Love and poetry. Indran

[Richard Vargas]

This poem made me want to meet her mom (provided it is about her mom, and not someone she made up.) Either way, I'll check out her work and books.

[Grace Cavalieri]

I love Sommer Browning's Mother

"My mother pays my sister and me $40 each to not have birthday parties."

[Don Berger]

Terrific wide-ranging poem--I don't know if Sommer Browning had it in mind, but there's a wonderful echo of Breton's "L'Union Libre" here ("Free Union" translated by David Antin).

[Jack Skelley]

Thanks, Mom! (Thanks Sommer & Terence!)

[Thomas Devaney]

Honest, open, surprising, real. Thank you for your poem, grateful for its life-force.

[Clarinda harriss]

I love this poem and the two women. Wow. Made my day.

[lally]

what Skelley said

[Eileen]

I love this poem.

[George J. Searles]

That's a very good one! I do fervently hope she'll submit to my magazine, Glimpse.

[Robert McDowell]

Sommer Browning has a mouth on her...for which I'm grateful. Now I must think of her as a descendant of an Elizabeth & Robert lovechild.

[Howard Bass]

Superb poem--thanks, Terence, for this one!

[Terence Winch]

Howard: Thanks for the comment.

[Jeffrey Cyphers Wright]

An engaging list— full of spirit, spunk and spark. Illuminates a special bond. May we all share some of the universitality in this vivid portrait.

[Peter Kearney]

Perhaps President Joe Biden also has hopes for great things from the Department of Transportation, having appointed so skilled and accomplished a person as Pete Buttigieg to be Secretary of that Department. Whether real or imaginary, our brilliant author's mother is pretty savvy and deserving of our attention.